Category Archives: legislature

But What About Jenae?

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The recent traffic crash in St. Louis that has cost a 17-year old volleyball player her legs has triggered outrage focused on St. Louis Circuit Attorney Kim Gardner—who has been something of a political lightning rod throughout her career.

The Missouri Senate is considering a remonstrance—a word describing a severe grievance or protest against a person or institution, usually demanding corrective action—against Gardner, who is accused of letting the driver of the car remain on the streets despite having a revoked driver’s license and having violated his bond in a robbery case at least fifty times.

The remonstrance is signed by every Republican in the Senate.  Gardner is a black Democrat and her defenders say the remonstrance and the Attorney General’s ouster petition filed against her are politically partisan and racist.

We will leave that fight to be waged in the political arena. We hope, however, that those who are and who will be focused on Gardner do no harm to Jenae Edmondson, the young volleyball player from Tennessee, for it can be too easy for them to use her as an instrument of their political rage at a time when she might desperately need support and hope.

What will they say to her?   What should they say to her?  What should you and I, most of us along in years with legs that carry us in the halls of power, on the playing fields and hiking and biking trails, and even on walks with our grandchildren?

Legs are part of our identity, particularly when we’re young. They’re part of running through life, part of our future, part of our social involvement—we dance with them; we jump to our feet when our team scores in a close game; we begin to drive a car with them.

If you and I—and the senators and the Attorney General—were to send her a letter, what would we tell a 17-year old girl who is dealing with the terrible question double-amputee Drake McHugh asks in King’s Row, “Where’s the rest of me?”

She is not the first person to suffer such a tragedy. But she’s the first person in her own body and in her own mind to go through it. And those who become immersed in the political fallout of this disaster should remember that and not victimize her additionally.

There are others, too, who intimately share her tragedy.  Her parents are doubly affected because they must deal with her injuries and with sustaining her character while they deal with suddenly becoming parents of a disabled teenager and the costs of her care now and in the future.

They are getting help from the Middle Tennessee Volleyball Club that has set up a GoFundMe account that is about halfway to meeting its one-million dollar goal to help pay medical and other bills.

There are many who can give her hope, who can inspire her at the right time to live through this, who can teach by their examples that there will be bikes to ride, trails to hike, games to be played, life to be lived.  Thousands of those who returned alive but damaged from Afghanistan are the ones we hope she will focus on.  At some point, Paralympians can provide inspiration. At some point, the remarkable U.S. Senator Tammy Duckworth of Illinois can become an inspiration—a woman who lost her legs in a military helicopter crash and who told Vogue magazine that when he sees her artificial legs, painted to match her skin tones, she sees “loss.”  But when she sees her steel and titanium prosthesis, “I see strength.”

But that is in the future.  Jenae and her family are living very much in the present with its present challenges.  We hope she does not become a pawn in a developing political battle.

She and her family have more important things to do.

 

 

Gambling Addiction? Don’t Blame Us

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The big push is underway in the legislature to let Missourians bet on sports.  A House committee has held a perfunctory hearing on two bills that have a tax structure in which the state will LOSE money.  An industry that profits from tilting the tables against its customers is about to tilt the tables against the state. And it’s likely the legislature will let them get away with it.

An article last week in The Hill, a D.C. publication that reports on government, says gambling addiction is going to be “the next opioid crisis.”

And the casino industry does not seem to care. At least not in Missouri.

Nationwide legal sports wagering will be five years old this year.  The Supreme Court threw out the national ban on it in 2018.  The growth of this betting has been nothing short of explosive. Missouri legislative fiscal experts say profits from sports wagering will exceed profits from all table games in all of our thirteen casinos in just three years.

The gambling industry has spent, and is spending, huge amounts of money wooing state legislatures. Last year The New York Times investigation detailed how it was done in Kansas. The newspaper also had a reporter in Missouri but when the issue died in a completely dysfunctional Senate, the investigation focused elsewhere.

It’s coming to Missouri—on the gaming industry’s terms.  A bill in the House that would allow sports wagering on the state’s terms will get a hearing this year but will go nowhere. That’s the official word.

The industry-backed bills set aside up to one-half million dollars for dealing with people who are affected by gambling addictions. If you think the casinos are being noble and responsible in doing this, you are wrong. They want nothing to do with that funding.

The money, instead, will come from the fund underwritten by fees the casinos pay for each person who enters the gambling area—fees that have been rendered woefully inadequate because of inflation since they were put in place n 1993.  The industry has fought, successfully, every attempt to bring the two dollars up to contemporary values.

One result of that resistance is that funding for our veterans homes is about one-third what it was a decade ago and it’s going to get worse.  Even the host cities of our casinos have seen their casino payments decline by about half, a circumstance their association doesn’t seem to think is worth discussing.

The bills in the House that set aside that half million dollars take it from the programs that draw support from that admission fee fund, meaning taking funding away from the veterans homes, the host cities, a state college scholarship program and a National Guard funeral escort program.

The industry doesn’t care. It accepts no financial responsibility for those who develop problems by over-participation in its offerings.

The Hill article says, “Most Americans ignored the opioid crisis, a staggering increase in overdose deaths in the 1990s and 2000s, until the government and news media processed the data and tendered a response.”  Timothy Fong, a clinical professor of psychiatry at UCLA, told the publication, “We have a movement toward expanding what was once considered a sin, what was once considered a vice, and embedding it at every level of American culture, down to kindergarten.”

“You have exactly the same players you had with opioids. You have government. You have industry. You have civilians, a lot of whom will benefit from this. And then you have a population who will develop an addiction, let’s say one [to] one-point-five percent of the population.  It’s a hidden addiction. You can’t see it, you can’t smell it, you can’t taste it.”

We’ve looked at a lot of studies in this country and others of gambling addiction.  All of them point to gambling addiction at least tripling with the advent of sports wagering.

Lia Nower, the director of the Center for Gambling Studies at Rutgers University, told The Hill, “Gambling is a very different addition from drugs or alcohol. If I’m drunk or high, at some point my family is going to figure it out. With gambling, I can be sitting with my kids, watching cartoons, and gambling away my house, my car, everything I own, on my mobile phone. How would you know?”

Nower says New Jersey, the first state to have newly-legal sports wagering studied the issue of problem gambling BEFORE it allowed sports wagering. But she says most states “are just legalizing this stuff without any idea of the effects.” Missouri seems to be in that category.

We have yet to hear anybody outside of those with special interests in the topic, even so much as mention this coming potential public health crisis. Passing a bill with a pick-a-number amount set aside—subject to appropriation by the legislature—is not addressing the problem.  And having the industry that causes the problem directly take responsibility for it seems to be out of the question.

The Missouri Gaming Association once proclaimed, “As good corporate citizens, casinos do more than a fair share for military veterans…We honor and support our military veterans and will continue to do so…”

Just don’t trouble us to adjust outdated admission fees to stop the financial bleeding of Missouri’s nursing homes for veterans. And certainly don’t expect us to have any financial responsibility for veterans or anyone else who become the victims of our enterprise.

Just remember, we’re good corporate citizens. And we expect the people you elected to represent you and to protect your citizens’ interests to do what we want.

“I do think there are watershed moments in all public health crises. Unfortunately, it usually takes some kind of crisis or tragedy to turn the tide,” says Nower.

The “next opioid crisis” and accompanying tragedies is developing at the state capitol. Does your legislator care?

 

“The Casinos Will Never Buy That”

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My Representative, Dave Griffith, has filed a third bill in the House that allows sports wagering.  But this bill is different because it gives the legislature an important choice—it can vote for casino industry legislation that does nothing for the state or it can vote for Rep. Griffith’s bill that says sports wagering will be permitted, but only on the state’s terms.

It’s House Bill 953 if you want to look it up on the House web page.

It says sports wagering is no different from any other kind of casino gambling, despite the industry claiming that it is some kind of special system with low returns (it’s not) and will be taxed at the same rate, 21% of adjusted revenues (what’s left after all bets are paid) instead of the 10% the casinos want.  Based on the fiscal note for the industry’s bill that passed the House but died in the Senate, the industry bill would let casinos keep more than $30 million in tax breaks while paying the state less than $13 million.  And that’s just the first of the problematic parts of the bill.

Rep. Griffith’s bill also would force the casinos to pay for the expected tripling of problem gambling that comes with sports wagering, instead of taking money away from programs and services the state committed long ago to finance with gambling revenue.

The bill also would increase the admission fee that casinos pay to the state, set in 1993 at two dollars and unchanged since.  The contemporary equivalent of two 1993 dollars is $4.10, meaning the casinos are keeping more than they are paying the state in contemporary dollars.

Fifty cents of the new admission fee will go to the casinos own host cities that have lost half of their admission fee funding as casino patronage has fallen to a decade. Fifty cents would go to the state gaming commission with the largest share of those proceeds going to alleviate some of the funding crunch at veterans nursing homes—which last year received about one-third as much as they did a decade ago.  The third fifty cents will provide funding to keep the Steamboat Arabia Museum from being bought by  Pennsylvania museum and moved to Pittsburgh.

The casinos can keep the remaining fifty cents.

The gaming commission will adjust the admission fees for inflation each year so that we don’t see the casinos getting richer and richer off of admission fees while host cities and counties and state programs grow poorer and poorer.

More times than I want to think of, members of the legislature have told me after discussing some of these ideas, “The casinos will never buy that.”

Indeed, they haven’t and we expect tooth-and-toenails opposition to the Griffith bill this year.

I wonder, however, if those lawmakers who have told me, “The casinos will never buy that” have ever considered how demeaning to the General Assembly that comment is, almost to the point of a self-indictment.

Who’s in charge here?   The legislature or the casinos?   The answer appears quite clear based on what legislation has been moved—although, thankfully, not finally passed.

What does that statement say about the integrity of the individual legislator or of the General Assembly as a whole?

And for those thinking of seeking higher office, what will sell better with the voters: letting them bet on tonight’s game, or standing with the state’s veterans, educators, and even the casinos’ host cities?

We think we know what the general public’s answers would be to these questions—and that answer does not bespeak confidence in those that public presumes will watch out for its interests. Why, then, are lawmakers who have said that willing to accept the premise?  What is it that they are lacking in making that statement?  And how are they fueling a political climate in which their constituents consider themselves victims of government instead of partners in it?

The casino industry has an incredible amount of influence in the capitol.  One representative told me in the first year of efforts to update casino laws and to protect the museum that the industry would be interested in what was being proposed. “I’ve already gotten two checks from them this year,” he told me.

But this year’s different.  The Griffith bill gives lawmakers a choice. Who’s more important: the people lawmakers know back home or the people who want something from them in the capitol hallways?

Is there a place for courage? Integrity?  Service in the name of the people?  Or will it be business as usual?

We’ll find out this year, maybe.   And maybe voters will remember the answer in the campaign year that comes next.

 

Notes from a Quiet Street (post-January celebration)

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We saw something a few days ago at the Capitol that I don’t think we’ve ever seen—generally bipartisan reaction to a governor’s State of the State message. Applause from both sides of the aisle and complimentary assessments from the minority party that exceeded such positive comments we’ve seen in the past regardless of who the governor has been.

We’ll watch in the next four months to see if the good feelings last.

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Our State Representative has filed a sports wagering bill that gives the legislature a choice for the first time in the five years the gambling industry has tried to push the legislature into passing what the industry is demanding.  The new bill also allows sports wagering, but says it will be done on the state’s terms, not the indutry’s terms.  Our lawmakers now have a choice of whether the people are at home are more important than the people in the hallways of the Capitol.

We’ll probably revisit that topic later.

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Both political parties are looking for viable national candidates or tickets for 2024.  We have one for the GOP that will be hard to beat.

Kinsinger and Cheney.

Or

Cheney and Kinsinger

The party is unlikely to nominate either one, let alone both.  But it would seem that both would be attractive to non-Trumpist GOPers and to independents alike and likely would even draw some interest from Democrats, especially if the Democrats nominate a ticket that has weaknesses—and as we write this, there are plenty of questions within the Democratic Party about whether a renomination of Joseph Biden would be the most solid choice, particularly if somebody not named Trump runs on the other side.

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The Hill recently published a list of eight Republicans who could challenge Donald Trump in 2024.  You know Yogi’s old saying about deju vu.  One of the ways The Donald got the nomination in 2016 was because several candidates split the 65% of the primary vote he didn’t get primary after primary, enabling him to get all of the delegates at one-third the price.

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Some think he won’t be a factor by then—that his concern about a new four-year term should be replaced by concern about a 10-15 year term.

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Joe Biden will turn 82 a few weeks after the 2024 election.  Donald Trump will be that old when he finishes a second term, if——

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We are only about 17 or 18 months away from national conventions, a year away from the first primaries.  That’s a long time in politics.  Plenty of time for something good to happen.

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And Lord knows we need something good to happen in our politics.

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We are grateful it is February.  We have weathered the worst month of the year. Cold and snow do not seem so permanent after we have left January.  February is a short month and by the end of it men are playing baseball again and racing engines are running hot. And it stays daylight longer.  And soon there will be a little green haze in the trees.

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Update:  As of this writing, the Mediacom cable that the company laid across our street instead of re-burying it at the end of last September has been ripped out only twice by the snowplow. It quit working a third time, perhaps because regular traffic dislodged it from its attachment post in our neighbor’s yard. But a technician hustled right out and got it hooked back up.

But it’s only February. Plenty of time for snowplows to roam the streets again.

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Super Bowl is next weekend.  That will end the NFL Season and set the stage for the new XFL season that will carry us until the Canadian Football League starts, filling the gap until the next NFL season.

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And speaking of the NFL—It has found a way to make an irrelevant football game even more irrelevant.  The All-Star game was flag football. Made-for-TV entertainment.

Watch next year for one-hand below the waist games.

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An article in the local paper about this year’s efforts to get sports wagering approved mentioned Rep. Dave Griffith’s bill but missed an important point.  It’s the first time the legislature has been given a clear altenrative to the casino industry’s demands.  This is the first time the lawmakers will have a chance to decide if sports wagering should be done on the casino industry’s terms….or in the best interests of the people who sent those lawmakers here.

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The Ring-Tailed Painter Puts a Governor in his Place 

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One of the great untapped resources for great stories from Missouri’s earliest days is the county histories that were compiled in the 1870s and ‘80s.

A few days ago, our indefatigable researcher was prowling through one of those old histories to make sure a footnote in the next Capitol book is correct and I came across the story of how Wakenda County became Carroll County.  That led to digging out the 1881 history of Carroll County where I met a fascinating character.  The account concluded with his departure for Texas and that led to an exploration of the early history of Texas. And there was the same guy, with a different name, who was part of the discontented Missourians that lit the fuse for the Texas Revolution.

I’ve written him up for an episode of Across Our Wide Missouri that I’ll record some day for The Missourinet.  The story will be shortened for time constraints.  But I want you to meet one of the many fascinating people whose often-colorful ghosts live in those old books.

The first settler of Carroll County “combined the characters of trapper, Indian skirmisher, and politician….a singular man, eccentric in his habits, and fond of secluding himself in the wilderness beyond the haunts of civilization. He was rough in his manners, but brave, hospitable and daring…He was uneducated, unpolished, profane and pugilistic.”  An 1881 county history says Martin Palmer, at social gatherings “would invariably get half drunk and invariably have a rough and tumble fight.”

He called himself the Ring-Tailed Panther, or as he pronounced it, “the Ring-Tailed Painter” and said he fed his children “on rattlesnake hearts fried in painter’s grease.”  A county in Texas is named for this “half horse and half alligator” of a man.

Martin Palmer was the first state representative from Carroll County in a state legislature that was a mixture of the genteel gentlemen from the city and rough-cut members of the outstate settlements.  During the first legislative session, held in St. Charles, some of the members got into a free-for-all and when Governor Alexander McNair tried to break up what Palmer called “the prettiest kind of fight,” Palmer landed a punch that knocked our first governor to the ground.   He told McNair, as he put it, “upon this principle of democratic liberty and equality,” that “A governor is no more in a fight than any other man.”

Wetmore’s Gazette, published in 1837, recorded that Palmer and his son loaded a small keel boat with salt as they headed for the second legislative session in St. Charles, planning to sell the much-valued mineral when they got there.  But the boat capsized in the dangerous Missouri River. The salt was lost and Palmer and his son survived by climbing on the upside-down boat and riding it until they landed at the now-gone town of Franklin. He remarked, “The river…is no respecter of persons; for, notwithstanding I am the people’s representative, I was cast away with as little ceremony as a stray dog would be turned out of a city church. “

He became a state senator in the third legislative session but left for Texas shortly after, in 1825, as one of the early Missouri residents to move to then-Mexican Texas.

A short time later he was accused of killing a man in an argument. He went to Louisiana and raised a force of men, returned and arrested all of the local Mexican government officials and took control of the area around Nacogdoches. He pronounced himself commander-in-chief of the local government in what became known as the Fredonian Rebellion and ordered all Americans to bear arms. He held “courts martial” for the local officials, convicted them, and sentenced them to death, then commuted the sentences on condition they leave Texas and never return.

Fellow Missourian Stephen F. Austin opposed the rebellion and wrote it was being led by “infatuated madmen.” It ended a month later when the Mexican Army arrived and Palmer went back to Louisiana. But some historians believe it became seed of the later Texas War for Independence.  Palmer later returned to become a key figure in the Texas Revolution.

He was elected a delegate to a convention at Washington-on-the-Brazos. When Sam Houston moved for adoption of the Texas Declaration of Independence, Palmer seconded the motion. He chaired the committee that wrote the Texas Constitution. But he knew it meant war with Mexico. He wrote his wife, “The declaration of our freedom, unless it is sealed with blood, is of no force.”

By now he had changed his last name from Palmer to Parmer. One contemporary observed, “He had a stubborn and determined will and showed impatience of delays…Hewas a unique character but with all he was a man with the best of impulses—honest, brave and heroic.” A fellow delegate called him “a wonderfully fascinating talker…a man absolutely without fear (who) held the Mexicans in contempt.”

After independence was won, Parmer served in the Texas congress and later was appointed Chief Justice of Jasper County, Texas.  He died there at the age of 71. He is buried thirty feet from the grave of Stephen F. Austin, “The Father of Texas,” in the Texas State Cemetery.

In 1876, the Texas Legislature honored a Parmer, “an eccentric Texan of the olden times,” by naming a panhandle county for him.

Missouri’s “Ring-tailed painter,” and fighting Texas pioneer Martin Parmer, born as Martin Palmer died, appropriately, on Texas Independence Day, March 2, 1850.

Support your local bureaucrat

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Governor Parson last week recommended a pretty healthy pay increase for state employees.  It’s a much-needed step for a much-underappreciated group of people.

Bureaucrats.   You know, those shiftless people who wrap everything in red tape when they’re not standing outside the front door of a state building, smoking.

Truth be told:  I’m married to a former bureaucrat.  She doesn’t smoke. She never took a state paycheck while frustrating taxpayers with poor service.  She never had anything to do with red tape. She was one of thousands of people who spent their days in cubicles performing everything from mundane tasks to examining situations that would be dangerous to public health and well-being.  She shuffled a lot of paper.  She created a lot of paperwork.  She was a necessary small cog in a very big wheel of a system designed to serve a public too easily bamboozled by opportunistic power-seekers who believe their best road to importance is attacking people such as her.

She left her cubicle behind several years ago to manage a bigger but far less lucrative project: Me.

We hope the legislature acts quickly on the governor’s recommendation of an 8.7 percent cost of living increase.  But his generous gesture constitutes a problem for some in our political world who cavalierly rattle on about shrinking government.  It also presents a problem for those who are eager to cut taxes so they have something to brag about in their 2024 campaigns.

The estimated cost of these salary increases is $151.2 million and that’s only the start.  The number will grow as time passes and more people find state salaries attractive enough to replenish a diminished state workforce—particularly in fields such as prison guards and mental health workers and social services workers, three fields—among many—that require courage and compassion many would find difficult to summon in those professional circumstances. The number also will grow as other increases are approved.

As welcome and as necessary as this expenditure is, it also should temper the enthusiasm of some to reduce the state’s ability to finance it today and properly to augment it tomorrow, lest it lead to layoffs in poorer economic times that will lessen or cancel the progress they create.

These proposed raises fly in the face of those who base their popularity on the time-worn concept of “shrinking government.”  Doing nothing has produced pretty good results for them, although it might be difficult to explain when constituents want to know why they can’t get services government should be providing but can’t get because of too many empty cubicles.

The Missouri Budget Project says the lack of more decent pay has resulted in the decline of state government jobs by 13.2 percent between February 2020 and June 2022. Governor Parson says there are 7,000 unfilled positions in state government and employee turnover is unacceptably high.

Those are numbers of which the “shrinkers” might take pride.  And now, here comes their conservative state leader trying to undo much of the hard-won results of their successful efforts to starve the beast. His common-sense proposal is a challenge to those who think effective and efficient government is possible only if fewer people run it and they’re content with being under-rewarded.  They’re just bureaucrats, you know.  Twenty-first century Bob Cratchits.

One of the goals of the suggested pay increases is to improve recruitment and retention of workers. Oh, Lord, that must mean he supports Big Government!!!

No, he doesn’t. He’s pushing for effective government and we can’t have effective government if we don’t have enough people to do the jobs that effective government requires.  And we can’t get—and keep—enough people if we (us taxpayers) aren’t responsible enough through our representatives and senators to pay them a more-worthy salary.

So, legislators, support your local bureaucrats.  And don’t follow up with something rash that will later set back whatever progress is attained through the governor’s recommendations

When the children’s poet roamed the Capitol

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Of all of the reporters who have covered the State Capitol, only one rose to such significance that a portrait of him is part of the great art in the building. One of the four famous Missourians whose portraits decorate the governor’s office is Eugene Field.  A plaque on the side of a building about three blocks away marks the place where he had his office as a correspondent for the St. Louis Journal.

If you are not familiar with the name, you undoubtedly at some point in your childhood heard the poem beginning:

“Wynken, Blyken, and Nod one night                                                                                            Sailed off in a wooden shoe….”

Or maybe:

The gingham dog and the calico cat
Side by side on the table sat…”

Or perhaps:

“I ain’t afraid uv snakes or toads, or bugs or worms or mice,                                                       An’ things ‘at girls are skeered uf I think are awful nice!”

One of these days we’ll go to the State Historical Society in Columbia and dig out the articles he wrote from Jefferson City but for now we’ll share with you a recollection by one of his contemporaries, Chicago newspaperman Slason Thompson, who write a book about Field in 1901:

Although Eugene Field made his first essay in journalism as a reporter, there is not the shadow of tradition that he made any more progress along the line of news-gathering and descriptive writing than he did as a student at Williams.  He had too many grotesque fancies dancing through his whimsical brain to make account or “copy” of the plain ordinary facts that for the most part make up the sum of the news of the average reporter’s day.  What he wrote for the St. Louis Journal or Times-Journal, therefore, had little relation to the happening he was sent out to report, but from the outset it possessed the quality that attracted readers.  The peculiarities and not the conventions of life appealed to him and he devoted himself to them with an assiduity that lasted while he lived.  Thus when he was sent by the Journal to Jefferson City to report the proceedings of the Missouri state Legislature, what his paper got was not an edifying summary of that unending grist of mostly irrelevant and immaterial legislation through the General Assembly hopper, but a running fire of pungent comment on the idiosyncrasies of its officers and members.  He would attach himself to the legislators whose personal qualities afforded most profitable ammunition for sport in print.  He shunned the sessions of Senate and House and held all night sessions of story and song with the choice spirits to be found on the floors and in the lobbies of every western legislature.  I wonder why I wrote “western” when the species is as ubiquitous in Maine as in Colorado?  From such sources Field gleaned the infinite fund of anecdote and of character-study which eventually made him the most sought-for boon companion that ever crossed the lobby of a legislature or of a state capital hotel in Missouri, Colorado, or Illinois. He was a looker-on in the legislative halls and right merrily he lampooned everything he saw. Nothing was too trivial for his notice, nothing so serious as to escape his ridicule or satire. 

Sounds as if Eugene Field would have loved some of the things we have today—blogs, Twitter, Facebook—-all of the social media stuff.  But Thompson says that at the time Field was part of the capitol press corps, “There was little about his work…that gave promise of anything beyond the spicy facility of a quick-witted, light-hearted western paragrapher.”

Thompson told of Field’s merry spirit when Fields was assigned the job of (as Thompson put it) “misreporting Carl Schurz when that peripatetic statesman stumped Missouri in 1874 as a candidate for re-election to the United States Senate.”

Field in later years paid unstinted tribute to the logic, eloquence, and patriotic force of Mr. Schurz’s futile appeals to rural voters of Missouri.  But during the trip his reports were in no wise conducive to the success of the Republican an Independent candidate.  Mr. Schurz’s only remonstrances were, “Field, why will you lie so outrageously?”  It was only by the exercise of careful watchfulness that Mr. Schurz’s party was saved from serious compromise through the practical jokes and snares which Field laid for the grave, but not revered Senator.  On one occasion when a party of German serenaders appeared at the hotel where the party was stopping, before Mr. Schurz had completed a necessary change of toilet. Field stepped out on the veranda, and waving the vociferous cornet and trombone to silence, proceeded to address the crowd in broken English.  As he went on the cheering soon subsided into amazed silence at the heterodox doctrines he uttered, until the bogus candidate was pushed unceremoniously aside by the real one.  Mr. Schurz had great difficulty in saving Field from the just wrath of the crowd, which had resented his broken English more than his political heresies.

On another occasion when there was a momentary delay on the part of the gentleman who was to introduce Mr. Schurz, Field stepped to the front and with a strong German accent addressed the gathering as follows:

“Ladies and Shentlemen:  I haf such a pad colt dot et vas not bossible for me to make you a speedg tonight, but I have die bleasure to introduce you to my prilliant chournalistic friend Euchene Fielt, who will spoke to you in my blace.” 

It was all done so quickly and so seriously that the joke was complete before Mr. Schurz could push himself into the centre of the stage. Annoyance and mirth mingled in the explanation that followed.  A love of music was the only thing that made Field tolerable to his serious-minded elder.

A July 3, 1924 story in the Jefferson City Daily Capital News gives us more stories about Fields’ days as a member of the Capitol press corps.  E. W. Stephens, the chairman of the State Capitol Commission that oversaw construction of the building, related:

“When Field was acting as a reporter in Jefferson City he sometimes tied his young son to a post while he went into the Capitol to get a story.  I remember that he organized a band of serenaders here that was known as the Van Amburgh Show. One man impersonated a monkey, one a lion, another a monkey, and so on.  It was a real circus especially when the lion roared.  Field took the men and drilled them and then serenaded the governor and other dignitaries. 

“Field was very fond of singing and one of his most popular songs was ‘I am captain of the Armyee.’  It goes like this:

I am Captain Jinks of the Horse marines,                                                                I feed my horse on corn and beans,                                                                        I court young ladies in their teen                                                                              I am a captain of the armyee.

“Another song he was fond of singing was, ‘If I was as young as I used to be.’  I remember one evening when Field was attending a party at the home of Judge Warren Woodson.  The evening was warm, and couples strolled to a nearby well occasionally, after water.  Someone came in and reported that a certain young man had been seen at the well kissing a young woman.  Field immediately paraphrased a song which he was in the habit of singing and when the couple returned sang the following version of ‘The Old Man.’

When I was young and in my prime,                                                                      I was drinking cold water most of my time.                                                                If any girl here will go to the well with me,                                                                I’ll show her I’m as young as I used to be.”

We have come across a letter Field wrote from Jefferson City to his wife, Julia, whom he had married in October, 1873, about two months before her seventeenth birthday.  She had remained in St. Joseph.  Most of the letter is the kind of usual chit-chat but toward the end, we learn a little about how bored he was in Jefferson City.  It was sent on January 12, 1874.

My dear wife.  I was delayed somewhat in making up my report tonight and am therefore compelled to sit up and wait for the down train so as to mail my letter to the Journal.  I have been feeling much better today and am more in condition to work.  Edgar’s letter received this morning. You will be very much disappointed about the wedding, will you now, Julia?  I am indeed sorry that I am so situated as to be unable to go.  Mr. Selby wants me to ask you whether you think it safe to let me stay in Jefferson this winter, without your presence to keep me within the proper limits. I tell him that it is your choice to be in St. Joseph and I want you to stay there as long as you feel that you want to.  This has been a cold, raw day and yet I have been on the go most of the time.  The session has not got fairly to running.  When it does, I expect we shall have very lively times.  I went to call on Miss Ella Woodson night before last.  She is looking about as usual, perhaps not quite so delicate.  I will write often to you, darling. Don’t forget that I love you dearly.  I send many kisses. Yours ever, Field.  

Eugene Field must have been one of those people who left his more conventional colleagues in the capitol press corps with a combination of amusement and embarrassment and maybe a little envy. But most of his fellow reporters then as well as his reportorial descendants now could or can identify with an observation he wrote in the Journal on August 3, 1878:

“A great many newspaper men lie awake night after night mentally debating whether they will leave their property to some charitable institution or spend it the next day for something with a little lemon in it.”

Notes from a quiet  street  (Happy New Year edition) 

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For the rare and cherished few who expect to find something new on this site a couple of times a week, we must explain that it is not because we had run out of pithiness. It is because a company that calls us a “valued customer” apparently doesn’t value our customership very much at all.

On September 29, Mediacom laid a cable on top of our street to restore our internet service after the Socket folks ripped up the buried line while digging to install their fiber optic cable.  A couple of weeks later I suggested to the folks at the local Mediacom office that it would be good to bury that cable before the first big snow brought out a snowplow that would collect it—and who knows how many above-ground connector boxes and private mail boxes that the cable pulls down as the snowplow proceeds down the street.

That line was still lying on the street until the afternoon of December 22.  It snowed and as I had told the foretold in the Mediacom office and the first snowplow did yank out the.  I saw several feet of orange cable in the yard of a neighbor up the street. On the 20th, I had visited the local office for a second time and a friendly lady behind the desk said repairs are usually made within 24 hours. I told a nice Mediacom lady from Iowa who answered the company trouble line that I expected this problem to be solved regardless of the temperature (which was below zero, you might remember) within 24 hours. The company sent us a notice that it would be a week before anything was done, that repairs would be made on the 28th and required us to be at home between 10 a.m. and noon.

On the afternoon of the 27th, Mediacom—without ever calling us or ringing our doorbell—stretched a new line across the top of the street. The line was only partly covered so vehicles going over it did not damage it. The next day, the Mediacom tech person who was supposed to respond rang our door bell. We had a nice discussion in which he told me, among other things, that we would lose our internet service as many times as the snowplows came out this winter.  Too bad. But that’s Mediacom Life.

I sent a letter to the editor of the News-Tribune, who published it yesterday. Several folks at church or at the noontime restaurants we checked out told me they agreed with it. They’re apparently valued customers, too.

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I made a big mistake the week before Christmas.

I bought a new computer because my old hard drive was dying.

For the price I paid for the computer, I could have bought about eight of Donald Trump’s superhero cards.

Buyer’s remorse has not yet set in, though.

If you bought any of them, would you let me know if any of them show him as a Capitol policeman on January 6, 2021 or as a Ukrainian freedom fighter?

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There’s this old and somewhat indelicate saying, “When you’re up to your ass in alligators, it’s too late to drain the swamp.”  The release of the January 6 Committee report has called that observation to mind in reference to someone who once promised to drain a certain swamp.

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One of the fun things about researching history is prowling through the millions of pages of old newspapers at the State Historical Society.  And reading the old advertisements is often fun.  I made a copy of a headline for one and it’s magneted to our refrigerator.

It says “Ice Cream is Real Food.”

Now that’s real truth in advertising.

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State Conservation Department Director Sara Pauley Parker wrote in her Missouri Conservationist  “Up Front” column in December of 2021 that she’s a dog person. She wrote, “I especially appreciate dogs that will look you in the eye, know their role in life, and want to serve honorably.”

I’m hoping the Missouri House and the Missouri Senate will be kennels, starting Wednesday.

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It’s hard to beat honey by itself and honey-butter on a hot roll is an unacknowledged delicacy.  A old newspaper ad I came across recently urges people to “Get that quick relief that brings back the normal ‘pep’ and energy. Don’t suffer a minute longer than you actually have to.” The cure?  Dr. Bell’s Pine Tar Honey for Coughs and Colds.

If Dr. Bell’s cure isn’t tasty enough, you might try a spoonful of a variation made by the Certified Hospital Products Company: Pine Tar Honey and Eucalyptus (Mentholated).

Menthol.  That will do the trick.

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Retired Missouri football coach Gary Pinkel has been inducted into the National Football Foundation College Football Hall of Fame, something he could not have imagined after his teams had gone 10-14 in his first two years in Columbia.  In fact, he admits he started wondering if he’d made a mistake going to Missouri and if he would last much longer.

In his first four years the Tigers were 22-25.   But Missouri kept him.

The Tigers played their 34th bowl game a few days before Christmas. (Their 35th bowl game was Covided out a couple of years ago).  Their fourth bowl loss in a row left Eliah Drinkwitz’s record at 17-19.

The fourth year will be a critical one for him, as it was for his predecessor, Barry Odom.  Odom was sacked when his Tigers were 25-25.  But Gary Pinkel was only 22-25 after four years and Missouri kept him.

How have other Mizzou coaches done after four years? Larry Smith was 18-27.  Bob Stull was 12-31-1 before he left the field and became an athletic director at another school.  Woody Widenhofer was 12-31-1 and Al Onofrio was 22-24.

Incidentally, Don Faurot, whose name is on the field on which Drinkwitz’s players perform, was 0-4 in bowl games.

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Ya Got Trouble Right Here in River City

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“Gotta figure out a way to keep the young ones moral after school,” the professor told the citizens of River City, Iowa.

Secretary of State Jay Ashcroft thinks he has a way to do that.  He proposes taking away state funding for local libraries that don’t adopt written policies that allow any parent or guardian of a minor “to determine what materials and access will be available to a minor,” particularly any materials that might appeal to that minor’s prurient interests.

The ultimate moral policeman would be the Secretary of State, whoever it is now and whoever it might be in the future.

Librarians throughout the state are not reacting kindly to his idea.  And local library boards, who are better cross-sections of community standards than one person at the state capital, by and large resent his meddling.

If you want to read the proposed rule, go to: https://www.sos.mo.gov/CMSImages/AdRules/main/images/15_CSR_30_200_015.pdf

We are now within a thirty-day public comment period before the legislature’s Joint Committee on Administrative Rules decides whether this overreach should become state policy.

One local library trustee who is known for wordiness minces no words in his response:

I am a trustee of a local library board, a position I have held off and on for more than twenty years. I was a delegate to the most recent White House Conference on Libraries and Information.  I am a published author of five books with a sixth book under consideration by publishers.

I am a reader.

I believe in the First Amendment.

I do not believe in censorship.

I do not believe in government overreach.

I am not a card-carrying member of the American Civil Liberties Union, but I do carry a valid library card.

The proposed rule on “Library Certification Requirements for the Protection of Minors” is a terrible rule and should be rejected by the Joint Committee on Administrative Rules.

This rule potentially gives the Secretary of State, whoever it might be or whoever it might become, the power to determine whether a library shall receive state funds based on his interpretation of what, as the rule states, “appeals to the prurient interest of any minor.”

The Secretary has issued a statement saying, “When state dollars are involved, we want to bring back local control and parental involvement in determining what children are exposed to. Foremost, we want to protect our children.”

The intimation in this statement that local control of libraries has been lost is irresponsible. Public libraries are governed by boards made up of local citizens. There has been no loss of local control.  “Parental involvement in determining what children are exposed to” likewise seems to suggest parents have been restricted in considering whether a book that might be proper for someone else’s child to read is improper for their own child to have.

He also has said, “We want to make sure libraries have the resources and materials they need for their constituents, but we also want our children to be ‘children’ a little longer than a pervasive culture may often dictate.”

I am afraid that the statement only invites chaos. If libraries are to serve “their constituents,” they must have a wide range of materials available to a broad range of individuals at various levels of maturity. To expect librarians to determine the level of maturity of every nine-year old who walks into their buildings is unrealistic.

When I first heard about this rule, my first question was, “Who makes the ultimate decision?”  It appears the answer is the Secretary of State.  To place one person in a position of second-guessing professional community librarians is dangerous.

The proposed rule does not define this critical phrase which puts the Secretary of State, as the supervisor of the patronage position of State Librarian, in the position of making subjective judgments about the prurience of any single publication that is objectionable to “any material in any form not approved by the minor’s parent or guardian.”

“Prurience” is not defined nor is “age appropriate,” three words that open the door to onerous penalties based on an interpretation of one parent and/or one state official. And stoking fear of some kind of vague “pervasive culture” that the statement suggests has invaded our public libraries and motivates the professionals who manage them is completely uncalled for.

The rule creates the potential for the kind of decision referred to by Justice Potter Stewart who discussed the threshold test for defining obscenity in Jacobellis v. Ohio in 1964:

“I shall not today attempt further to define the kinds of material I understand to be embraced within that shorthand description [“hard-core pornography”], and perhaps I could never succeed in intelligibly doing so. But I know it when I see it…”

By working backward from the parent to the Secretary of State, this rule indicates that a library could lose state funding if one parent of one child disagrees with a library’s policy on collection acquisitions by finding one book that the parent feels appeals to the child’s “prurient interest” and files the objection with the State Librarian and the librarian’s supervisor, the Secretary of State.

I do not believe our libraries and our librarians are  the “dance at the arm’ry” referred to by Professor Harold Hill in The Music Man:

“Libertine men and scarlet women, and ragtime, shameless musicThat’ll grab your son, your daughter with the arms of a jungle, animal instinctMass-stariaFriends, the idle brain is the devil’s playground.”

Libraries are not devil’s playgrounds. Librarians are not “libertine” or “scarlet” but are instead highly professional defenders of the right to read, the right to know, the right to think.  I believe they carefully evaluate additions to the collections, but they recognize that children as well as adults mature differently and determining “age appropriateness” is one of their most difficult tasks.

But if my children were still young readers, I should be the one to decide what they bring home. It is not my place to decide what should be available to another child of the same age but a higher maturity.

We refer to these institutions as free public libraries. I believe the word “free” means more than an institution that does not charge a membership fee that limits access to intellectual exploration and growth.

This is a bad rule that places one person in a position of denying funding to one of the most important institutions in any community because he or she agrees with one parent who finds one book objectionable.

Moral judgments are personal. The power to force others to bend to the moral judgment of any single political officer by cutting off funding to a library should never be allowed.

This rule is anti-freedom at several levels and has no business being part of state government. While I am concerned with our children remaining children, I am more concerned with what happens with a politician being a politician and what it can mean to the liberties of us all.

I urge the committee to reject this proposal.

Bob Priddy

Jefferson City

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Notes from a Quiet (Leafs in the Gutters) Street

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Tomorrow is election day. At least it is for the thousands of people who have not voted early.  We are two of those who have. Visited the courthouse last Wednesday.  We passed three people coming out when we arrived, and four people going in when we left.  Not sure what our numbers were but we were probably closed to numbers 1999 and 2000.

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We like early voting. No lying about being out of town.  There were times when you had to have an excuse, such as being out of town on election day, to vote absentee.  I was always tempted to vote absentee and then on election day drive outside the city limits and then come back in, thus fulfilling the statement that I would be out of town that day.  The language never says the WHOLE day.

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The first Christmas catalogues arrived before Halloween.  One of them has, among other things, t-shirts with humorous messages on them—at least humorous to some.

One of the t-shirts says, “If YouTube, Twitter, and Facebook merged, you would have Youtwitface.”

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Originalist thinking by some judges interpreting the Constitution seems to overlook a lot of things that have happened since 1791.  Upholding the purity of the Second Amendment is seen by some as allowing the use of large-capacity magazines in today’s weapons.  But the authors of the Bill of Rights lived in a time when guns fired only one bullet at a time and required several seconds to reload, prime, cock, aim, and fire again.

Where’s the National Musket Association when we need it?

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Inflation was portrayed during the recent campaign as an issue caused by one person and that can be cured by one party.  If it was that simple, we wouldn’t have inflation.

Or climate change (for those who believe in it). Or a drug problem.  Or a crime problem.

And for those who preach simple solutions—I have this rash…….

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Once again, we gave away no treats for Halloween.  We went to a movie instead.  It’s a matter of self-preservation.  We don’t want to be caught with all that chocolate left over.

We saw the latest Julia Roberts-George Clooney movie.  George was George. Julia was Julia. The popcorn was pretty good, too.

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We noticed a sign of what the movie theatre business is becoming.  The ticket booths were closed.  We bought our tickets at the concession stand.                                                    -0-

Had a doctor’s appointment earlier that day.  The nurse was dressed up as Lilo, as in Lilo and Stitch (a Disney animated sci-fi movie of a decade ago). Given what nurses deal with, we thought she should have been dressed as Stitch.

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With the end of the elections, the first round of legislative chaos is about to begin.  The offices of those defeated or who were term limited are now available for surviving incumbents to scramble to get. For the next few weeks the Capitol will look like a big used furniture emporium with furniture stacked in the hallways waiting to go to its new offices.

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Will the Missouri Tigers go bowling this year?  Sure.  The Columbia Mall has several lanes available.